During a sword fight of the end of “the Scottish play,” the battle became so intense the sword was knocked out of the hand of one of the actors. The weapon flew into the audience, where it stuck in the floor — right in front of the first row of seats.
“The patron that was sitting in that seat just calmly reached out and picked it up and handed it back to the actor. And we continued with the scene,” said David Pera of Valparaiso. “But that’s theater, you know. The show must go on, regardless.”
For 60 years Chicago Street Theatre has raised the curtain on hundreds of performances, from familiar classics to new and cutting edge works. The Valparaiso theater will celebrate its rich history with its diamond jubilee celebration “Encores 2015!” at 7 p.m. Feb. 27 at Valparaiso University Center for the Arts.
“We saw Encores as sort of an opportunity to do a homecoming thing and bring back some past performers,” said Eric Brant, marketing director and 35-year member of CST. “Some of them haven’t been on a stage in 20 years.”
Not only does this year commemorate the 60th anniversary of the theater company, but also the 20th anniversary of its children’s programming and the 15th anniversary of its concert series.
“Our artistic committee saw it as an opportunity to celebrate our group and who we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going,” said Brant, who lives in Valparaiso.
The company’s biggest fundraiser of the year, “Encores” will offer a retrospective of CST with songs from musicals that have been popular for the group, as well as scenes from some of its many award-winning productions. About 32 actors will perform scenes that span the six decades. Songs from musicals including “Guys and Dolls,” “The Sound of Music” and “Fiddler on the Roof” will be presented, along with scenes from the works of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee. The evening will also offer a preview of CST’s 61st season with one musical number, Brant said.
“We’ll also feature scenes from ‘The Boys Next Door,’ because it went to Scotland (for the Glasgow International Theatre Festival),” he said. “All of this will be performed and juxtaposed with a multi-media shows that shows playbills from the original shows.”
At the celebration a large silent auction will feature a variety of items including works by local artists and items from some of the concert series performers.
Money raised by the event will help fund education programs and the free Shakespeare in the Park performances in the summer, Brant said.
“We also have a capital campaign that we’ve been running because our 10-year plan is to add onto our building,” he said.
The anniversary event will also pay tribute to the many founding members who are no longer here with a memoriam section in the show, Brant said.
In the beginning
It was 1955 when the seeds of Chicago Street Theatre were first planted. To raise funds for band uniforms, PTA members produced the comedic play “Papa is All.” The response was so great, they went on to form the Valparaiso Little Theatre Guild. Two years later, the group changed its name to Community Theatre Guild since its members came several area towns.
For the next 40 years, CTG produces shows at Memorial Opera House, built in 1893 as a Civil War memorial. The theater company leased the facility until 1995.
“We helped raise money to help refurbish it for its 100th anniversary, and the direction the county wanted to go with it was different than we wanted to go, so we chose to leave,” Brant said. “We never really stopped doing shows in the duration that we left there.”
CTG continued to produce shows at various locations around town. In 1997, the group purchased the former Assemblies of God Church on Chicago Street. To reflect its new location, the company was renamed Chicago Street Theatre.
“We have big plans for our future, and we want to celebrate where we came from and all that we’ve been through,” Brant said. “Part of the season for us has been about revisiting things and being nostalgic, but another part is about celebrating how we persevered and how we reinvented ourselves and how we constantly have something going on at Chicago Street.”
A family affair
Along with producing plays and musicals, over the years the company has produced many families.
Couples like David and Jonni Pera met at the theater, and their children have gone on to become involved there as well.
“My mother was the one who had me go down to the theater after I graduated Boston University to see David perform and thought that he looked like a neat guy and said ‘go meet him.'” Jonni Pera said. “She sort of was our matchmaker.”
Jonni Pera moved to Valparaiso with her family when she was in fourth grade. Her parents became active in the CTG, and instilled that love of the theater in their children. They took Jonni and her brother, Paul, to the theater where they worked backstage.
It was 1977 when David Pera met Jonni, “and the rest is history,” he said. “I can say that would be the No. 1 highlight.”
Resident playwright and Literary Manager Jim Henry, who had been involved with plays in high school, discovered CST when he was 33 after his dog was cast in the musical “Annie.”
“And I had to come see my dog in the play, right? And when I watched the show, I kind of got the bug,” said Henry, who lives in Wheeler.
He has “been loving it ever since.” More than 20 years later, many of his family members also have stage credits, including all of his children have been on stage, and some of his grandchildren. In addition, his mother, grandfather and uncles have all appeared in productions.
“We’ve had five generations of my family that have been on that stage,” Henry said.
And while it may be a cliché, the group itself is a giant family, members said.
“When you’re doing theater, you work together closely for six weeks … You become intertwined as family members. Your joys become other peoples’ joys. And your tragedies and your sadness also becomes theirs, and it’s a good helping relationship to have,” Jonni Pera said.
While pregnant with her second child, she and David were involved in show “God’s Favorite.” Jonni went into labor right before the show’s opening, and there was concern whether David would make it to the performance.
At the theater, a company members put up a sign that read: “Welcome to the new CTG star: Raechel Pera.”
“That kind of experience of celebrating your joys with each other makes it very important as far as family goes,” Jonni Pera said.
The show must go on
Throughout the years there have been several instances of one actor stepping into a role at the last minute. About 15 company members have on at least one occasion, been called upon to learn a role in a short amount of time — sometimes less than a day.
“There’s an elite club at Chicago Street of actors that are called in at the absolutely last minute to go on stage,” Henry said.
While directing “Death of a Maiden” in the late 1990s, Henry found out one of the cast members was sick with the flu. The cast and crew quickly ran through a rehearsal, with Henry carrying the script. An announcement was made before the show began about the change and to let the audience know why he would be carrying the script.
“At the end of the play, I bowed and threw the script in the air behind me, and the audience laughed,” Henry said. “What was funny was after the show, I was in the lobby … and this lady came up to me and said ‘hey you did a great job, but why were you carrying that newspaper around the whole time?'”
During a production of “California Suite,” director Brant found out one of the actresses couldn’t make it because her daughter was hospitalized. He did what needed to be done.
“So I shaved my legs and I played her,” Brant said.
Earlier this month the weather was the culprit. The blizzard on Super Bowl Sunday threatened the matinee performance of “Tammy: A Coming of Age Story about a Girl Who Is Part T-REX.” While some audience members called to change tickets, others showed up.
“We ended up doing the show for 15 people,” Brant said. “There were as many people on stage as there were in the house.”
And then there is the unexpected.
When then leg of a chair slipped off the edge of the stage during a bar scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the actor fell off the stage and right onto the laps of audience members.
“The audience laughed like crazy, and he got right back up and stumbled back on stage and sat down,” Henry said. “There were a couple audience members that said they were going to come back another night to see that moment because it was the funniest thing in the play …because it was a drunk scene, they just thought this drunk fell over.”
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A production of “Dracula” in the 1980s resulted in an inexplicable cameo by a live bat.
“We had a mechanical bat that was supposed to fly in at a certain point during the scene. And it worked great every night. Well this particular night — and this is a true story — this particular night, we did have a bat that lived in the opera house. A real bat, way up in the rafters,” David Pera said. “Believe it or not, right on cue, in that scene, the bat — the live bat – flies through the French doors, out over the audience, back on the stage and out through the door again. That’s true. That really happened. So we didn’t have to use a mechanical bat that night.”
Thinking it was planned, audience members wondered how they did it.
“That’s the thing about live theater,” Brant said. “Anything can happen.”
Lasting legacy
In its 60 years, Chicago Street Theatre has built a reputation for award-winning productions and a willingness to try something new.
“Nobody has — in Northwest Indiana — has had the success and reputation that we have,” David Pera said. “We have a lot of people with longevity, but we’re constantly refreshing ourselves with new talent. We’re a very open theater. It’s not like a club or something.”
A lot of the work CST produces is stuff no other theater would think of doing, David Pera said, like cutting-edge dramas that deal with social issues dhwich raw people from Chicago to see the theater’s shows.
“Not to say that we don’t do light-hearted stuff too, because we do. But our forte has been the heavy stuff, which we thoroughly enjoy,” David Pera said.
Among the more controversial productions was “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” by Edward Albee, which is about a man who falls in love with a goat.
“We had people who refused to come see it. I mean, we’ve had numerous shows when we’ve done the edgy slot, where people have gotten up and left in the middle of it,” Brant said. “But we kind of said ‘if people are doing that, it’s better than them doing nothing.’ At least it’s a reaction.”
CST tries to balance each season out with a variety of show, he said, to “give everybody a little bit of something.”
The theater has also become known for giving new playwrights a chance to see their works performed.
“The word’s gotten out that we do the work. Most community theaters — in fact very few — would have a literary manager,” Henry said. “But people know all over the country that we do the work, so we’ll get submissions quite often.”
Between 30 and 40 scripts are submitted by playwrights each year, he said.
The first new play CST ever produced was Henry’s “Angels of Lemnos,” which it will stage again in April as part of the anniversary season.
Henry, who has had his work performed in Chicago and off-Broadway, is excited to see CST produce it for the second time.
“It will be interesting to see it from the eyes of a different director with different interpretations of all seven roles in the play,” Henry said.
Members of the company have gone on to become recording artists, a lighting director for an opera company and a cast member at Second City.
It’s the commitment and dedication of CST members that have brought it so far, David Pera said.
“It’s taken a lot of work to get to us to where we’re at the level that we’re at now in terms of our ability to produce, just high quality theater in Northwest Indiana,” David Pera said. “We’ve got a lot of talented people behind the scenes working on it. Not just actors, but technical staff — lighting and sound and everything that goes into it. Costumes. We’ve just got great people doing all those important jobs.”
Jonni Pera, who directed the production of “The Boys Next Door,” that won honors in Scotland, said she feels like she has been involved in some of the best shows in Northwest Indiana.
“All of the shows are really important and make me proud of what we do and how we do it,” said Jonni Pera, who sees theater as a way of giving back to the community. “It is a proud moment for the community as well as for the theater community. A lot of theaters don’t get to live as long as we lived, and we’re sort of proud of that.”
Encores 2015 – Diamond Jubilee Celebration of Chicago Street Theatre
When: Feb. 27
Where: Valparaiso University Center for the Arts, 1709 Chapel Drive, Valparaiso
Tickets: $60
Information: 219-464-1636 or chicagostreet.org
Moments in Chicago Street Theatre History
1955: PTA members at Valparaiso’s Ben Franklin Junior High School produce a play to raise money for band uniforms, and audience response prompts them to form the Valparaiso Little Theatre Guild. The first production, “Papa is All,” opens in August at Memorial Opera House.
1957: To better reflect the membership ranges beyond Valparaiso, the name is changed to Community Theatre Guild. CTG leases the Memorial Opera House. A children’s show is added to the regular season
1964: After the success of CTG’s first musical, “Once Upon A Mattress,” it is decided that one of the mainstage productions will always be musicals.
1979: Beginning with the first Valparaiso Popcorn Festival, CTG supports the event by producing a Popcorn Children’s Play each year.
1981: CTG begins participating in the Indiana Community Theatre League State Excerpt Festival.
1988: Beginning with the Winter Carnival, children take part in “Kids CTG,” which are shows cast with only children and run by junior technicians.
1991: CTG wins international honors for Best Show and Best Actor in Glasgow International Theatre Festival.
1993: CTG begins participating in the Northwest Indiana Excellence in Theatre Foundation and wins Best Actor and Best Director awards.
1995: “Kids CTG” becomes an annual, scheduled event.
1996: With Memorial Opera House in need of major renovation, CTG moves out of the building at the end of its 40th year. Performances are held at various venues around the area including Machinists’ Hall, Valparaiso University and in a rented room dubbed “CTG’s Alley Studio.”
1997: CTG purchases the former Assemblies of God Church and turns it into the Chicago Street Theatre. The season is expanded to nine productions plus regularly-scheduled theater classes for children and adults. CTG changes its name to Chicago Street Theatre.
2001: Chicago Street Theatre hires its first full time staff member.
2005: Chicago Street Theatre hires a box office manager.
2007: Chicago Street Theatre begins a major renovation to its lobby, auditorium and bathrooms in the late fall and re-opens in February 2008. The auditorium is renamed the Schilke Miller Mullen Auditorium in honor of contributions from Mr. and Mrs. Edward Mullen and Dr. and Mrs. Dane Miller.
2008: Chicago Street Theatre reopens in February after renovations are complete. The theater hires a director of education.
2010: Chicago Street Theatre receives a donation to remodel the upstairs classroom and rehearsal space. The new Edith B. Wood Studio includes a small stage for class showcases, members’ salons, and intimate studio productions.
2012: Chicago Street Theatre presents Shakespeare in the Park: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” offering 2 free performances for 2,500 people in Valparaiso’s new Central Park Plaza.
2013: Chicago Street Theatre co-produces with Genesius Guild “A Picasso,” the first full production in the Edith B. Wood Studio Theatre.
2015: CST celebrates its 60th anniversary.
Upcoming performances at Chicago Street Theatre
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Call 219-464-1636 or visit chicagostreet.org.
60th Anniversary Theater Season
March 6-14: “Henry and Ramona”
April 10-25: “Angels of Lemnos”
May 22-June 6: “Cobb”
July 10-11: “Hamlet” — free shows at Central Park Plaza
July 17-25: “Hamlet” — ticketed performances at the theater.
Mainstage Concerts
April 19: Switchback
April 26: Jim Peterik
May 31: Derek St. Holmes
Edie’s Attic Concerts
March 15: Callaghan
March 29: Acoustic Eidolon
Oct. 4: Claude Bourbon